Reviews and Praise

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“Vuic’s book is important reading for anyone wanting a more thorough understanding of more than just the Vietnam War or nursing history.  Its relevance also encompasses enduring complexities of gender, cultural representations, and collective memory. Highly recommended.”

— Choice

 

“Excellent study… The strength of this book is Vuic’s main source: nurses who served in Vietnam…Officer, Nurse, Woman enriches a growing body of literature on second-wave feminism’s broad impact and successfully challenges and complicates the dominant narrative of military history and destabilizes familiar categories—especially our notions about women and war.”

— Susan Gelfand Malka, Journal of American History

 

“A well researched, well written account that will be used by professors and students who wish to understand better the complexity of gendered military service.”

— D’Ann Campbell, Journal of Military History

 

“Vuic offers an important new contribution to how we understand women’s participation in the U.S. military after World War II.”

— Tanya L. Roth, H-Minerva, H-Net Reviews

 

“Utilizing a feminist paradigm, Kara Dixon Vuic’s evocative and unique dissection of the collective gender experiences of Army Nurse Corps officers in Vietnam and its aftermath breaks new ground in the history of military nursing…I found Officer, Nurse, Woman quite intriguing. I can unreservedly recommend it as a valuable addition to the literature documenting nurse participation in the Vietnam War.”

— Mary T. Sarnecky, Nursing History Review

 

“Provides an important foundation for understanding how military women reflect social and cultural gender roles, how institutions respond to and influence gender norms, and how the response shapes and challenges our understanding of citizenship and nation…Vuic’s book will be important for scholars of the time period as well as those interested in gender, women’s work, nursing history, and the military.”

— Julie Fairman, Bulletin of the History of Medicine

 

“The best one volume treatment available that integrates the personal experiences of nurses with a nuanced understanding of social, political, military, gender, and women’s history alongside feminist theory.”

— Lance Janda, Minerva: Women and War

 

“This is a wonderful book, chock full of oral history and riveting personal stories.  It makes a meaningful contribution to Vietnam War and twentieth-century gender historiography.”

— Penelope Adams Moon, Historian

 

“Solid, engaging, insightful scholarship.  To see the effective mixing of gender history and social history with military history is refreshing and welcome.  Vuic addresses a deep hole in the scholarship on the Vietnam War.”

— William T. Allison, Georgia Southern University

 

“Officer, Nurse, Woman contributes mightily to the historiography of military nurses, of women in the military, and women in the paid work force after World War II.”

— Elizabeth Hillman, University of California Hastings College of the Law